Issue 04-08-2023
Featured story
Deep space: Abigail Maxwell’s Thought for the week
I have been speaking in Meeting for twenty-two years. Has what I said been ministry at all? Might it be, now? How could I know?
Top stories
Rub of the green: Rebecca Hardy talks to Rupert Read about a new climate project
My interview with Rupert Read, the ecological philosopher and Salter Lecturer 2023, starts off on a surprisingly optimistic note. It’s an unlikely twist, given the fact that my newsfeed is filled with headlines of heatwaves, wildfires, floods, evacuated tourists, and politicians stepping back from vital climate pledges. But Rupert Read...
On the books: Helen Buckroyd says fiction can evoke the religious experience
‘Religion’ is such a big word that I am almost scared to approach it. But I should. For a year now I have been attending Quaker Meetings – Meetings of the Religious Society of Friends. So, like it or not, I can’t escape the noun ‘religion’ or its adjective, ‘religious’.
The gift of time: Colin Brown on the future of The Pales
The Pales Meeting House has not been home to a Local Meeting for decades, but it still houses occasional worship and other activities, making it the oldest continuously-used Meeting house in Wales. After many years of wrestling with what to do with this precious old building, a resolution has arrived!
‘Art the Arms Fair’ returns
Art the Arms Fair (AAF), the partly-Quaker-founded arts exhibition, will return this year. AAF uses ‘creative resistance’ against Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI), the huge arms fair.
Friendless Childhoods Explain War, by Bob Johnson
Our friend Bob Johnson has produced something here that delights our sensitivities, and challenges our assumptions about international affairs. We expect Bob to be making connections, and we’ve certainly got that here. Reading though this short book made me stop, and stare, and think. In the end it made...
All articles
Friends mark Hiroshima Day
Quakers are marking Hiroshima Day this weekend, with open days and public events across the country. The event will honour the seventy-eighth anniversary since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima – and Nagasaki three days later – leaving more than 200,000 dead.
Retreat of Malvern arms fair celebrated
Quakers in Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Herefordshire are celebrating the news that an arms fair they have long-campaigned against has no plans to return.
FCNL lobbies to stop gun violence
A US Quaker has called for US Congress to stop community gun violence by investing in ‘violence interrupter programs’.
Launch of new Quaker equity network
A new Quaker equity network is to look at how differences, including those attributed to race, class, sex and neurodiversity, are interlinked, in order to build a better future.
Eye - 4 August 2023
Friendly variety How Quakerism is presented to the world can reflect the complexities we find within our community surprisingly succinctly, as David Fish, of Rugby Meeting, found. He told Eye: ‘I have been following Quaker thinkers like David Harris (“more time to nurture spirituality”) and, more recently, Stephen Petter and...
Prayer
Love letters to what I can’t imagine, letters that shape-change into loops and twists I didn’t mean to write, finding the best words and letting them go.
Letters - 04 August 2023
‘Joy in Enough’ I was interested in the article ‘Food for thought’ by Martyn Kelly in the Friend (30 June). Food is something with deep cultural connections, and food goes to the heart of community. A proliferation of articles about food choice in relation to the environmental impact of our choices...